Trauma and Families

Moving beyond a difficult past.

by Sonia Taitz

Trauma and Families: Moving Beyond a Difficult Past

If I healed my parents, would they care for me?

Published on November 9, 2011 by Sonia Taitz in Trauma and Families

In my last essay, I described growing up as the daughter of war-torn survivors of the Holocaust. People who go through trauma often bottle their emotions up (to the extent they can), but my parents did not. It was all out there, explicitly. Even my own name, I knew, was the name of someone who had died "over there." I was meant to hear, and learn, and most of all—to remember. It was though at birth I'd been given a folded flag, which had once draped a coffin, to bear. I carried it everywhere; it was my standard.

On some unconscious level, I felt that my parents were asking me to join their special group. We were all "people who knew more than the obvious." The world had a past; it had secrets; all was not how it appeared to be. If there is an opposite to rose-colored glasses, that is what I learned to put on, glasses that revealed the dark, painful truths of existence. Hatred, pettiness, loss, betrayal - all these lay under the surface. The neighbor next door seemed nice, but would he have saved us, or would he have given us up? The kindly shopkeeper who reached his arm up to get my favorite "Betty and Veronica" comic book - would he have turned his head away as Jews, condemned, were marched out of town? You might suppose that the traumas of the past almost ruined everything for me. But they didn't. At least not in an obvious way. Because I decided that I was part of my parents' elite mission. The mission, should I choose to accept it, was to make the world a better place. When I'd done that, I could let them know that everything different now, defused. And then we could be happy together.

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I wanted to be a hero, as my father had been, as a watchmaker at Dachau. His own father had been killed two decades before, by the Cossacks, and he had left school to apprentice as a watchmaker. This trade saved his life, since the Nazis insisted on punctuality in all their routines. They set him up in a workshop to mend their clocks and watches. After a little while, my father brought in some fellow prisoners, and taught them to act as though they were fixing timepieces. In the end, they all survived the horrors of this camp together.

I wanted to be like him. I wanted to storm barricades, rescue the helpless, confront the wicked. The best way, I saw, was through my brain. From an early age I did well at school (gold stars became 100s and then As), so my father encouraged me to focus on academics. Through that long but straight path, over the course of years, I made it back to Europe, the continent that had exiled my parents before I was born. I was admitted to study literature as a student at Oxford University. There, I felt, I could confront and defuse age-old European attitudes, making the world safe for my parents, for me, and for the world. My parents could not speak English well; I would speak for them. They could not get to college, much less Oxford; I'd represent them in the most cultured and resonant tones and phrases. And with my efforts, I thought, I'd make things right.